B00DW1DUQA EBOK (18 page)

The big hand of the clock leapt a whole minute at a time. Finn had been told to wait for the moment it jerked onto one minute before six, then race off immediately. He then had exactly that minute to run down the spiral stairs and start pulling on the bell-rope. If he ran he would get there just in time.

Engn was a place of bells. A bell was always ringing somewhere, clanging nearby or tolling in the distance. Very often two or three would argue away at the same time, trying to shout over each other. The bells, Master Owyn had said, told everyone what to do, where to go. There was a language to them. A code. Each had its own particular tone or timbre. Some were leaden, booming roars. Others rang out reluctant notes, repeated at long intervals. Some were barely audible. But each was different. The boys would be in the refectory, or milling around in the Octagon, when Master Owyn would stop speaking and cock his head, listening. The Quarter Bell, he would say, or The Change Bell. Hurry now.

To Finn, there was never any discernable difference to the background clamour of near and far bells. It seemed incredible everyone ended up where they were supposed to be. What happened if bells were missed, or late, or early? Did everything just stop working?

It was his job to sound the Sixth Bell to wake up the other apprentices. He’d been told very clearly to make sure he rang it at just the right moment. If he didn’t, everything else would get out of sync

‘Why don’t I just wait downstairs by the longcase clock and time the bell by that?’ he’d asked the master after he’d been given these instructions. Master Owyn had scowled at him. Trapped with him there in the tiny room, Finn had been suddenly afraid.

‘Know best do you boy? You have to do it this way, by the tower clock. That’s the way it’s always been done.’

‘Yes, Master.’

Today he had a couple of moments to spare. The hand on the clock above him has just swept onto the notch three minutes away from six. There was time to try out his plan. He scraped one of the wooden boxes across the floor and set it underneath the skylight. Standing on top he reached up and tried to push the small window open. It was very heavy, its frame thick lead, but he managed to budge it a little. He looked around for something he could use as a wedge. Using a tube of black iron from a broken bedstead, he managed to lever the skylight upwards so that it stood vertically upwards. Finn poked his head through the gap.

A wind, cold in the early morning, chilled his face. He gazed out across a vast new world; a landscape of slate slopes with gutter-rivers running through it, the peaks of the roofline its mountains. Clumps of moss for bushes and woods clung to everything but the vertical cliffs of the grey stone buildings. He could see for miles, across acres and acres of roof. It was a wonderful sight. He felt the urge to climb outside and run across those slopes, just as he had once raced over the hills and valleys at home. Perhaps there was even a way to get back to the outer walls of Engn, to escape, by leaping across them.

One of the great wheels turned just off to his left, its relentless churning motion filling him with alarm for a moment, making him think something was flying towards him. Along the ridge of the rooftop, a line of large crows watched him with suspicious eyes. He marvelled that they chose to say in Engn when they could just fly away. Beyond them, visible between the ridge and the rampart of the clock tower, he could see a dome. Some green metal covered its curved surfaces and it had windows set all around its base, forty or fifty of them. The dome must be huge. Finn tried to work out where it was in relation to the rooms and halls he knew. It was then he noticed the silhouette of someone in one of those distant windows, watching him.

The head and shoulders of a figure, black against the lighted interior. Finn ducked down, knowing it was too late. Who was watching him? Master Owyn, perhaps, checking up on him? Or someone else? Perhaps it was Connor. Finn peeped back over the lip of the skylight. The figure still stood there. Now it moved. It opened the window, catching the rising sun in a blinding glint. Against the light inside, Finn still couldn’t make out who it was, but now he could see the figure waving. No, not waving, beckoning. Telling Finn to come.

He looked around. What did it mean? And how could he possibly reach the dome? The skylight was big enough to poke his head through but his shoulders certainly wouldn’t fit. He looked down at the frame of the window from the outside, to see if there was some weakness, some way of making the opening larger, but there was nothing. When he looked back up, the figure was gone, the window in the dome closed once more.

A bell began to chime, a deep metallic boom in the cold air. Finn looked up at the clock. It was already the sixth hour. He had missed his cue. With a gasp he hauled the skylight shut, jumped from the wooden box and hurled himself down the stairs.

He reached the rope in record time. The longcase clock still hadn’t ticked over to one minute past. Finn began to tug on the thick rope snaking up into the campanile over the dormitory, working the swinging bell up to speed until, finally, it began to clang and clang to wake the other boys. He pulled on the rope for a minute and then strode off for breakfast before any of them came down.

His stomach fizzed with anxiety that someone would have noticed the late bell. He couldn’t face eating the bread and butter laid out for them on the long wooden tables. Master Owyn, strolling around the edges of the room with his hands behind his back, glanced at Finn but said nothing. The other boys arrived in a clamour of shouts and laughter.

Finn began to relax. Chewing a mouthful of bread, he thought about what he’d seen. It couldn’t have been Master Owyn in the dome because the master was here. Who, then? One of the other boys playing a trick on him? But that wasn’t possible either. The others were as trapped as he was. Someone else he hadn’t even thought of? Perhaps the stories about the wreckers were true after all, and one of them was trying to reach him?

He sat and thought about all this, and about Connor, and about the tests the gatekeeper had mentioned, until a bell rang to tell them it was time to return to work in the Valve Hall.

The following day, after their third stretch of valve construction, Finn and the other boys clattered into the Octagon to play
scrum
. In theory it was a ball-game, with two clear sides and a definite set of rules. The ball was a sack of leather, sewn into a rough sphere and filled with some sort of stuffing. A doorway on each side of the Octagon was used as a goal, the aim of the game being to wrestle the ball into the opponent’s doorway. In practice the game generally descended into a mass brawl, with a cluster of pushing, shoving, kicking boys lurching around the Octagon and the ball somewhere within.

Finn stood on the edge of the pack now, watching as one of the older boys, Tanner, wrestled the ball away and began to pound towards the opponent’s goal. Tanner was a magnificent player of the game: strong, fearless, fast. He could keep running with four, five, six other boys hanging off him. Tanner always scored and all the newcomers were in awe of him. Finn grinned and cheered at the sight of him. Tanner was on his team today, while Graves, Croft and Bellow were on the opposing side.

Finn thought, once again, about the beckoning figure in the dome window. He’d looked again that morning but seen no-one. And what, exactly, had the figure been telling him to do? Was he somehow meant to find another route onto the roofs, pick his way across to the dome? There were large gutters that could act as paths, but did they reach right across? There might be some great drop down to the ground somewhere. Perhaps he was supposed to find some other means of escaping the Octagon and the Valve Hall. He couldn’t think how. In any case, perhaps that wasn’t it at all. Perhaps the test was to discover whether he ignored the invitation, whether he resisted temptation. How could he tell?

The doorway that led out of the Octagon, the one they’d come through the day they arrived, wasn’t too far away from where he was standing. The wrestling mass of boys was over in the far corner. He could creep out of the Octagon now without anyone noticing. He backed into the shadows of the wall. His heart thumped. He wondered if he dared do it. He remembered the day, long before, when he had stood on the branch of one oak tree and thought about leaping across to the next. He
could
do it, he knew. Was that what the figure in the dome wanted?

But if he did flee what would he do then? He’d never be able to find his way to the dome, or even back through Engn to the gates. He’d be crushed in some part of the machinery, or the Ironclads would find him and bring him back. He had no chance. But, still, it was tempting to try. Delicious to consider it.

‘Smithson!’

A chorus of voices brought him back to the Octagon. He’d stopped paying attention to the game. Bellow was charging towards him over the flint ground, the ball tucked under his arm, a throng of the other boys racing after him. Finn was suddenly the only player standing in Bellow’s way.

He could tell Croft and Bellow apart now. They were cousins, and had grown up on the same farm, their mothers, sisters. Croft was the shorter of the two. He had a scar across his upper lip, an old wound that twisted his face into a constant scowl. His cousin was taller, his face unmarred, handsome even. Bellow was, if anything, crueller than Croft. When they attacked one of the other boys it was Bellow who laughed out loud at each cry of pain.

‘Smithson! Stop him!’ It was Tanner, pounding after Bellow, but not close enough to catch him.

Finn trotted forward into Bellow’s path and prepared to try and stop the charging boy. Perhaps if he could hold him up for long enough the others would arrive to help. Bellow roared with delight and flew directly at Finn, one arm outstretched towards Finn’s face, hand clenched into a fist.

Finn wanted to turn and run. Bellow, stronger and taller, would send him flying. But he had to try and stop him. He hated to be beaten. He
wouldn’t
run. Bellow was only feet away now. The taller boy could have simply dodged around Finn, fending him off with his hand to score an easy goal but instead he charged directly at Finn, intending to knock him flat. That was Bellow’s mistake. Finn had learned a thing or two in all the games he’d played with Connor.

He waited until the last moment then, dodging underneath Bellow’s outstretched fist, hurled himself into Bellow’s legs. A knee caught Finn on the chin, making him bite his tongue hard, but he grabbed hold of the bigger boy’s knees and squeezed, preventing Bellow from running.

Bellow, carried forward by his own momentum, crashed face-first into the hard flints, the ball squirting out to one side. From his position on the ground, Finn saw Tanner pick it up and hurl it back into the throng, away from their goal. Tanner nodded at Finn then charged off to rejoin the game. Finn rose to his knees and then to his feet. Nearby, Bellow also sat up, his hands clutched to his nose and forehead. Blood seeped between his fingers.

‘You’ll pay for that, Smithson. I’ve broken one of my teeth. I’ll break all of yours.’

Finn stood and simply grinned. He’d regret it later, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘You should have a nice scar, there,’ he said. ‘Now we won’t be able to tell you apart from your cousin.’

He turned and trotted off towards the mêlée.

After the game, they trooped back across the flints to wind their way back up to the dormitory. Finn avoided Bellow and the others. Tanner had scored twice and Bellow’s team hadn’t scored any. Several boys patted Finn on the back for his tackle as they pushed inside the doorway.

At the bottom of the stairs they stopped to watch an old man descending the spiral staircase. He stooped under the load of a heavy weight strapped to his back that looked as if it would topple him forwards at any moment. The man grimaced with the effort of walking, staring at the steps in front of him, clutching the handrail with a white hand. He looked a little like the master in the little hut, the gatekeeper on the first day. The same nose, the same bushy beard. Were they brothers? His hair was an explosion of grey, wiry hair. He ignored the crowd of boys gathered at the foot of the stairs and pushed through to reach the longcase clock. The rope that led up to the campanile swayed slightly, as if someone had recently been swinging on it.

The old man squatted so that the weight on his back rested on the ground. He shrugged leather straps off his shoulders. The boys all watched in silence, unsure what was happening. The weight, Finn could see now, was a wooden case containing another clock. An arrangement of gimbals cradled the mechanism, presumably so the man’s movements didn’t interfere with its accuracy.

A large ring of keys jangled on the man’s belt: hundreds and hundreds of them, large and small, silver and gold and dull steel. He picked through them now to select one and unlocked the longcase clock. He slipped a pair of tiny, round glasses out of a pocket and perching them on his sharp nose he began to adjust wheels and knobs within the longcase. Patches of pink scalp were visible through his wild, grey hair. He turned to the clock he’d carried and compared the time, adjusting the longcase several times. Then, with his eyes shut, he adjusted the swing of the pendulum with a gentle hand, stroking it back into its proper path.

Finally, he locked the longcase clock back up, stood and took a small, black leather book from another pocket. He wrote something down with a pen. Finn could see pages of text set out in columns, something like the line-of-sight logs from back home.

Only when the notebook was put away did the man appear to notice the boys. He gazed around at his audience. Most of them were much taller than he was. He looked suddenly like a cornered animal. Finn saw Graves nudge the boy standing next to him. Croft.

‘Hey, old man,’ asked Croft. ‘Have you got the time?’

The boys sniggered. The man said nothing for a moment, simply staring at Graves as if he didn’t understand.

‘What’s the matter? Are you deaf?’ said Graves. Finn, watching the old man saw the briefest spark of something unexpected in his eye: a look of amusement. It was there for only a moment. Then it was gone and the old man was a cornered rat once more.